But then I read stores like these, where an ambulance takes five hours to reach a hospital eight miles away, or of the poor German fellow who drove right into a closed offramp and I have to wonder, are we getting too dependant on technology?

Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a
vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class
worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that
they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their
offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able
office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid,
un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical
installation.

Similarly with “incentives to bring the best teachers to the
worst schools.” Setting aside the fact that you are dealing with a
line of work whose labor union is armed with thermonuclear weapons,
even supposing you could establish a free market in public-school
teachers, how could the worst schools—inner-city schools serving
black neighborhoods—ever outbid leafy, affluent suburbs for those
“best teachers”? And how many “best teachers” are there,
anyway? As the Thernstroms point out, a lot of these prescriptions
for school reform assume an unlimited supply of “saints and
masochists”—teachers like those in the KIPPs schools, who, Mr. Tough tells us,
work 15 to 16 hours a day. I am sure there are some people who
enter the teaching profession with the desire to crunch their way
daily across the crack-vial-littered streets of crime-wrecked
inner-city neighborhoods in order to put in 15-hour working days,
but I doubt there are many such.

Those of us who deal with programming and are suspicious enough
to see that our daily professional life could be improved, are often
confronted with functional programming. There is a great
misunderstanding going on regarding what functional programming is
and what are its benefits, and where and how imperative programming
is wrong. Supporters of functional programming claim it is the best
thing since slice bread, but I beg to differ, and that's why I
decided to write this blog.

Update a few minutes later

I'll go out on a limb here and make a prediction: By January of 2009, email as we know it will be dead. It
will have to be, given these current stats at The Company (which is a
small webhosting company):

Amount of spam through our spam firewall

Total

%

Day

%

Hour

%

Blocked

53,632,194

94

47,855

96

2,425

95

Blocked: Virus

17,276

0

0

0

0

0

Quarantined

54

0

0

0

0

0

Allowed: Tagged

658,888

1

177

0

7

0

Allowed

2,807,144

5

1,957

4

119

5

Total Received

57,115,556

100

49,989

100

2,551

100

As a friend said (on a private post—hope he doesn't mind me posting it
here):

But really I hope you all, being support and customer care,
really know that we, being server ops, are doing everything we can
to keep up with the dramatic increase in mail volume internet
wide.

Yesterday alone we saw a temporary spike of email volume that was
measured at 100Mb/sec for about 2
hours. This is really really hard to keep up with, and has a lot to
do with why I am getting out of the webhosting industry all
together.

And another friend (not the same as quoted above) is seriously looking
for another job away from webhosting as well, although I don't know if it
has to do with the email volume or not.

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that's a bum rap. What
could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate
unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for
others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who
employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

Oh, it might be slightly more complicated than that. Maybe when
Scrooge demands less coal for his fire, less coal ends up being
mined. But that's fine, too. Instead of digging coal for Scrooge,
some would-be miner is now free to perform some other service for
himself or someone else.

I've always felt that Ebeneezer Scrooge got a bum rap (than again, that
could be my inner “Bah, humbug!” speaking). Several years ago, after
watching about the five billionth rehashing of A
Chrismas Carol, I got the idea of writing a short story about Scrooge
that takes place seven years after the events in the book. In the story
idea, Scrooge is once again visited by the ghost of his ex-partner Marley,
wherein he learns that not only has he lost all his wealth to philanthropy,
but that the very people he was helping were taking advantage of him.

I had dinner with my old roommate Rob tonight, and the main topic of conversation was, if you can believe it, spam.

Rob, who works at Negiyo, is dealing with similar issues that I am at The Company, only a few orders of magnitude worse (Rob was amused at the low volume we have to deal with at The Company). They have over a 150 email servers slowly melting under the strain of spam coming into their network.

Given the load, I mentioned to Rob that it sounds like Negiyo is having C10k problems with email, and that they should talk to Google. Rob didn't think that was likely.

“I don't think our customers will go for that,” said Rob. “We can have 100% uptime on the webserver, but if email goes down for even five minutes, our phones light up.” Spring concurred (since she too, works for Negiyo) and yes, I have to admit, our customers are the same way.

“You could always just dump bounce messages, and messages sent to <>,” I said.

Listowners perogative to ask a question that is only halfway on
topic … ;) I figure some people here may have some good
suggestions—offlist please.

There is a SpamAssassin machine(s) filtering spam being sent to
the list that sits in front of the classiccmp server (we're also
making use of Pyzor, Razor, milter-ahead, and clamav). It's been
doing a wonderful job, such that most spam is kept out of the
moderators faces. However, over the past few months I've noticed
that more and more is getting through (not to the list, but to the
moderators eyes who have to kill it all manually). Same goes for
many of my customers.

What concerns me is that 99% of the new spam making it through is
vaguely sensible english phrases (apparently automatically pulled
from online books, or from usenet post archives, etc.). If there was
also an advertisement text, Spamassassin could catch that. However,
the text is all just english phrases (I've noted them to be targeted
phrases, like having to do with computers, sometimes old ones)
but … the advertisement is a graphic attachment. Since
SpamAssassin can't do OCR on the small gif or jpg attachment that
says “buy viagra here” … I am not sure what to do about this. It
comes from all over, not just a few servers, etc.

Before you say “just kill all emails with graphic attachments”
[the mailing list this appeared on is geared
for older computer systems and as such, the general population of
the list frown on email attachments, being “old school” and all
that; thus this comment from the list owner —Editor] …
keep in mind that these spamassassin machines do their job for
thousands of domains that I host, not just classiccmp.org. So just
killing all emails with graphic attachments is simply not an option.
If anyone can give me a few ideas that will work well for ISP/hosting-class
environments, I'd love to hear it. Off-list please! Thanks in
advance for any advice.

Best regards,

Jay West

I can't see this continuing for much longer before most ISPs and webhost companies
simply give up on email entirely (or some people get real serious about
solving the spamming problem and we end up with a rash of spammers dying due
to excessive
rapid lead poisoning).

What you might want to start with is disallowing catchalls (all
email to a domain going to a single email account). That will
probably cut some of the spam down. Another thing you might
consider is setting backup
MX recordsto 127.0.0.1. I
tried that for my own domain and it cut spam 40% (I don't filter
spam to my personal domain, but by the same token, I don't have a
catchall for my domain either). You could also try looking into greylisting although it might
not scale for a few thousand domains.

Another idea I just had—perhaps do an MD5 hash over the body of
the email and store the result. If you get a match (or some number
of matches) then it's probably spam and can be deleted (although it
may be a mailing list; try applying some heuristics).

The email woes continue to pile up (complaint one: not receiving email,
but a check of the logs show a successful delivery of email—go figure.
Complaint two: another customer says emails aren't going out. Upon further
inquiry, it seems he's trying to send out a few hundred emails to his
clients, wishing them a happy holiday season. Sigh) as I was attempting to
finish up some household chores before driving into The Office for a dinner
meeting.

Then it was the drive down to The Office and then a three hour meeting
(with dinner). Much talk, not much resolution as XXXXX
XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXX XX XX XX
XXXX XXXXXXXXXX XX XX XXXXXXX XX XXXXXXX XX XX XXXX (best not to
ask—it's still starting up).

When it comes time to prepare and file your 2006 tax return, make
sure you don't overlook the “federal excise tax refund credit.”
You claim the credit on line 71 of your form 1040. A similar line
will be available if you file the short form 1040A. If you have
family or friends who no longer file a tax return AND they have
their own land phone in their home and have been paying a phone bill
for years, make sure they know about this form 1040EZ-T.

What is this all about? Well the federal excise tax has been
charged to you on your phone bill for years. It is an old tax tha t
was assessed on your toll calls based on how far the call was being
made and how much time you talked on that call. When phone companies
began to offer flat fee phone service, challenges to the excise tax
ended up in federal courts in several districts of the country. The
challenges pointed out that flat fee/rate phone service had nothing
to do with the distance and the length of the phone call. Therefore,
the excise tax should/could not be assessed.

It's not that I hate the destinations—often times I'm ambivilent about the destination and I'm only going because of people I know (although there are exceptions). I hate travel because of the getting there (and boy, do I have plenty of travel horror stories to tell).

Travel in and of itself is not my thing.

So I'm finding Michael Palin'sSahara to be very amusing, in a schadenfreude type of way. From trains that run over a day late where the first class accomidations means you share a bunk with one other person (and steerage class means you share a bunk with a ton of iron ore) to river boats that run aground. Where you get to sample such delicacies such as camel head and sheep testicles.

Yum.

Yes, watching the show is definitely re-enforcing my biases against travel. And truely, there is no better way to travel than through the small screen (in much the same way that I appreciate nature best through the Animal Channel).

“I'm afraid we're going to have to call it off,” I said to Spring over the phone.

“Why?”

“Because I'm talking to Mr. Officer here,” I said, looking up and out the car window at the State Trooper as I handed over my drivers license, insurance card and registration.

I was rushing home from rebooting a recalcitrant server, doing about 80mph on I-95 so that Spring and I could catch the Tri-Rail down to Opa-Locka; Spring thought I might like to take pictures of the City Hall, and in order to do this, we needed to make the 5:00 pm train.

But I suspect Mr. Officer overheard my comment to Spring. He glanced at my papers, then pulled a pen out. “Would you rather have a warning, or a ticket?” he asked.

Well. That's certainly a no-brainer. “A warning?”

“Okay,” said Mr. Officer. “Just keep it slow, and you'll want to check out your tire there.” He pointed to the front driver side tire. “That looks to be, what? 20 pounds of pressure. A bit low.” I climbed out of the car and took a look.

Yup, it was low.

“So please, get it fixed.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking the written warning from him. “Merry Christmas.”

Spring felt I
might like to take pictures of the Opa-Locka City
Hall. She also felt it would be nice if we took the Tri-Rail down to the Opa-Locka station,
about a block away from the City Hall.

I almost didn't make it but I
parked at the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station and as I was walking (the parking
lot is about a block away from the station itself) I heard the train pulling
into the station. I started to run (boy, am I out of shape) but it turned
out to be a maintenance train going through the station.

Spring had already bought my ticket and I had a few minutes to catch my
breath before the actual Tri-Rail train pulled up.

But Spring has miscalculated the timing and was unaware that we would
arrive at Opa-Locka after it got dark. And because the neighborhood of
Opa-Locka is less than
stellar, we decided to stick around the train station until we could
head back north.

The other day a young girl came to the door to solicit my support
for her presidential candidate. I asked her why I should vote for
this man. She was very nice and earnest, but if you got her off the
talking points she was utterly unprepared to argue anything, because
she didn't know what she was talking about. She had bullet points,
and she believed that any reasonable person would see the importance
of these issues and naturally fall in line. But she could not
support any of her assertions. Her final selling point: Kerry would
roll back the tax cuts.

Then came the Parable of the Stairs, of course. My tiresome,
shopworn, oft-told tale, a piece of unsupportable meaningless
anecdotal drivel about how I turned my tax cut into a nice staircase
that replaced a crumbling eyesore, hired a few people and injected
money far and wide—from the guys who demolished the old stairs,
the guys who built the new one, the family firm that sold the stone,
the other firm that rented the Bobcats, the entrepreneur who
fabricated the railings in his garage, and the guy who did the
landscaping. Also the company that sold him the plants. And the
light fixtures. It's called economic activity. Whatss more, home
improvements added to the value of this pile, which mean that my
assessment would increase, bumping up my property taxes. To say
nothing of the general beautification of the neighborhood. Next
year, if my taxes didn't shoot up, I had another project planned.
Raise my taxes, and it won't happen—I won't hire anyone, and they
won't hire anyone, rent anything, buy anything. You see?

“Well, it's a philosophical difference,” she sniffed. She had
pegged me as a form of life last seen clilcking the leash off a dog
at Abu Ghraib. “I think the money should have gone straight to
those people instead of trickling down.” Those last two words were
said with an edge.

“But then I wouldn't have hired them,” I said. “I wouldn't
have new steps. And they wouldn't have done anything to get the
money.”

“Well, what did you do?” she snapped.

“What do you mean?”

“Why should the government have given you the money in the first
place?”

“They didn't give it to me. They just took less of my
money.”

That was the last straw. Now she was angry. And the truth came
out:

“Well, why is it your money? I think it should be their
money.”

Then she left.

And walked down the stairs. I let her go without charging a toll.
It's the philanthropist in me.

So I learn that Archie Comics are getting a face lift with a new direction in art. It seems odd to think that Archie & Co. will have a whole new look—what caused this to happen? Wasn't the old house style good enough?

But when you look closer at past (70s) Archie (50s and 80s) comics (60s) you can see the style has changed over time—it's not as static as people make it out to be.

And perhaps the Archie company realized they needed to update the look of the comic to remain relevant (and more importantly—solvent!) in these modern days. After all, they know their market better than I do (heck, I don't even buy Archie comics anymore) and it's the obsessive catering to the hard-core fan that has gotten DC and Marvel into the mess they're in today (wherein the story lines are hopelessly messy, and any new time buyer is going to be totally lost without buying about a thousand dollars worth of back issues across all their titles—in other words, they aren't new reader or casual reader friendly).

But it sure would go down easier if the artwork was even halfway decent.

Today was so bad at The Office that I've blocked it out of my mind (read: the only notes I have for today were “bad hair day” and since I'm writing this nearly a week later, I've forgotten all the details).

My name is David Rhodes. In 1992, my car was repossessed and
bill collectors were hounding me. I was laid off work and my
unemployment ran out. In October 1992, I received a letter telling
me how to earn $800,000 anytime I wanted. O fcourse, I was
skeptical, but because I was so desperate and virtually had nothing
to lose, I gave it a try. In January of 1993 my family and I went
on a 10 day cruise. The next month I bought a brand new Mercedes
with cash. I am currently building a new home in Virginia and will
never have to work again. This money program really works perfectly
every time. I never failed to receive less than $500,000. This is
a legitimate moneymaking opportunity. It does not require you to
sell anything or come in contact with people. And, best of all, you
only leave the house to mail the letters. If you have always
thought that someday you would get a lucky break, then simply follow
the instructions and make your dreams come true.

Yes, I received a David Rhodes letter via the post
office (I can only hope that Brian W., Carrissa P., Christopher J., Shira
K., Carla G. and Melody B. aren't taken away by the authorities (at least,
until after Christmas) as such chain
letters are illegal).

Hummus is easy to make. And a heck of a lot cheaper to make than to buy. How easy? Cook some chick peas in boiling water. Drain water. Mash. Add tahini (which is crushed seaseme seeds, and it's pretty easy to get here in Lower Sheol), water and lemom juice (keep adding until the consistency is nice and smooth). Optionally throw into a blender or food processor to make it even smoother.

That's it.

So of course, I start the cooking process, and forget about it for four hours!

What I ended up with was a bunch of carbonized chick peas (which, as Alton Brown would say, are not Good Eats™) and one rather burnt pan.

An hour of hard scrubbing later, and I'm on my second attempt.

Only this time, I have a timer I'm carrying around to remind me to check up on things every twenty minutes or so.

The result: some gosh darn good hummus (I added garlic and olives to the mixture, as Spring likes her hummus that way).

Spam levels rose by another 35% in Novemeber. This really does
prove to me that I made the right decision in leaving the webhosting
business. Its getting to a point now were email is going to no
longer be cost effective to host. Now where I am at now has their
own problems with spam, it's nothing to the level of where my last
employeer was at. Here we get about 200-300 spam messages a day.
Though we do get too many false positives but that is going to be a
big part of what I am going to be doing here early on.

First one, from Bunny: Straight No Chaser—12 Days. A twelve man a-cappella group sings “The Twelve Days of Christmas” but it's no Twelve Days you've ever heard (I do feel sorry for the one Jewish guy in the group, but you'll have to watch it to see what I mean).

The second one: Pachelbel Rant—a rant on Pachelbel's one hit wonder, Canon in D (and yes, it surprised me that the Classical World had one hit wonders), and amazingly enough, one can't get away from Pachelbel's Canon in D. Even today.

I wasn't feeling all that well yesterday so when I finally got home from a last minute dinner meeting (set up a few weeks ago by Smirk, but only today did he remember it—sigh) I fell asleep.

Slept a long time, but when I did get up, I felt much better.

So I spent the day taking it easy (hey, it's Christmas Eve), catching up on all the entries I've missed here for the past week, and even made some brownies (Spring's sister is arriving here tomorrow for a few days).

Christmas as only slightly chaotic as the plans to pick up Spring's sister changed at the last minute.

But dinner went well and the rest of the evening was spent watching a very hokey Hebrew Hammer (think an Orthodox Jewish version of Shaft—I guess that makes it a Judexploitation film) and several episodes of Torchwood (a spinoff of Dr. Who) that was better than I expected it to be (basically, man who can't die heads a team recovering alien artifiacts that show up on Earth).

And today was a quiet day. Not much of anything noteworthy happened today.

On the one hand, I loved the film, the lines (“What are you looking at? You're laborers; you should be laboring. That's what you get for not having an education.”), the characters (especially Michelle Meyrink's Jordan)—everything about the film. So why shouldn't I want to see more of these characters?

And then we come to the second hand—“Real Genius” was self-contained. There were no dangling plot lines to tie up. The Good Guys got the girls, the Bad Guys got a home filled with popcorn, all was right with the world. What possible story could they do after twenty years? Mitch, Chris, Jordan and Ick go in search of Lazlo and Sherry Hollyfeld before Jerry Hathaway and Kent get to him first?

I'm having problems seeing a possible sequel. Sometimes, no sequel is better than a sequel.

Bunny wanted to see “The Gamers” again, but my copy isn't a full copy—it's missing the commentary so I told her that she might want to rent it from Netflix. And apparently, in looking for it, she came across “Gamers” which has some big name stars for such a niche market film.

But I'm finding the clips to be very cringe inducing indeed and I'm thinking I'll probably just skip this one entirely.

Creating a specialized serial cable to go from my Color
Computer, which used a 4-pin DIN plug, to my Amiga 500, which used
the more standard DB-25.

Load up VIP Writer, and select the “Print” option.

Load up a terminal program on the Amiga, open up a capture
buffer and then hold down the space bar to fool VIP Writer on the
Color Computer that indeed, it was talking to a printer. Once the
column finished “printing” I then saved the buffer into a file. I
did that for every column you see.

That was just to get the files off the Color Computer. I still had to
get them to the webserver in question, which, at that time, was my
workstation at FAU. That involved one of the following steps
(which I don't recall, since it's been about fourteen years):

Dial into the FAU modem bank (this was way back before
ubiquitous Internet access like we have now) and connect through an
intermediary system (the dialup modems were hooked into a terminal
server, which didn't talk TCP/IP, but DECNET—the intermediary system talked both
DECNET and TCP/IP—this was way back
when there were other networking standards other than TCP/IP) and then to my workstation, whereupon I
had to upload the columns using the Kermit
protocol, which was dog slow, but it worked, unlike the
XModem, YModem or ZModem
protocols.

Copy the files to an MS-DOS formatted floppy using a special program on
the Amiga, which reprogrammed the floppy hardware (and caused the
computer to act very strangely while doing so), then physically take
the disk to FAU, where I then used a Sun Unix
workstation in the Computer Science Department to
copy the files off, and then use FTP to get them to my workstation,
where I could convert them to HTML and so place them online.

Thankfully, such days are long past us, and the ability to copy data is
indeed easier. I'm working on a project at The Company whereby we need to
extract data from QuickBooks. This involves:

A program running on the same computer as QuickBooks that talks
to QuickBooks using COM,
with the data encoded in qbXML.

The same program will then package the data into another form of
XML and use
SOAP to
transfer the data to a webserver.

The webserver is running a program that can accept the SOAP request, then
extract the qbXML from inside the SOAP request. It then extracts
the data from inside the qbXML and then we can work with
the data. Probably by passing it onto yet another program.

Yup. Nothing like wrapping data into two different XML formats, transferring it
across the network like a webpage, then extracting the data from within two
different XML
formats.

Next we looked for air transportation–and struck out. Delta and
Southwest both offer nonstop Raleigh-Orlando service, but Delta
wanted $700 per ticket for the 80-minute nonstop flight (less
expensive seats were available for an ATL connection). Southwest was
cheaper by far, but still set me back $1200 for four tickets.

Gulping hard again, I ponied up the fare.

Lastly, I checked on Walt Disney World tickets. As every parent
on earth but me knows, there are four parks at WDW: Magic Kingdom; Epcot; MGM Studios; and Animal
Kingdom. My local AAA agency educated me on the ins and outs of
WDW ticket options, and
we settled on "Magic Your Way" tickets for two adults and two kids
with no "Park Hopper" option (if you don't know, don't ask) for five
days.

Total Disney ticket cost: $774. I gulped again and proffered my
Amex card to the nice AAA lady.

And it gets even worse from there. I read parts of this aloud to Bunny,
and as I was reading she was imploring me not to read anymore, lest I hate travel even more than I do
now. “You don't need to read stuff like that,” she said.

But as I read further (it's a threepartarticle)
I began to realize that Will Allen III was
particularly stupid in planning his trip to the Kingdom of the Rat God in Central Sheol—this
from someone who can find safe taxicab services in the Sudan. Although, I
guess when you are used to arranging reliable private overland transport
from Mandalay to Bagan in Myanmar, going to Walt Disney World, the American
Mecca for kids, during the Holiday Season, appears as a no-brainer.

Speaking of Disney—I have
three travel stories relating to Disney, two horrible (to give an indication
of just why I hate travel) and one just plain silly (not to give a totally
biased acount against travel).

Disney Horror Story #1

My Mom's cousin and her family had come down to visit us and they
wanted to take their kids to Walt Disney World. I was invited to go
along, and on Sunday, Feburary 27th, 1983, we drove to
Orlando. The adults got to sit in the cab of the pickup truck,
while us kids were relegated to the uncovered bed of the
truck in back. The trip up there wasn't that bad, and we stayed
with some friends of the family, who also worked at Disney.

The following day, Monday the 28th, we went to Epcot,
having driven in the back entrance by said family friend, thus
avoiding both the long wait to get into the park, and the actual
price of admission. We ended up entering and exiting the park
through one of the exhibitions.

That part wasn't that bad.

After spending a few hours at Epcot, we left then headed over to
Sea World for a bit. Things were going fine until I, sitting in the
front row of the Killer Whale show, got drenched by one of the
whales.

And I didn't have a change of clothes.

So, on the drive back, there I was, huddled beneath a thin jacket
in the back of an open pickup truck, trying desperately to avoid
freezing to death. It was a miserable three hour
tour trip.

Made all the worse because Monday, February 28th,
1983, was the season finale of M.A.S.H, which at the time, was my
favorite TV series.

Which means I missed it.

Well, not entirely—I did see the final two minutes of the
episode.

I ended up getting horribly sick that week.

[Okay, technically it wasn't
technically a horror story about Disney, but we still
visited one of the parks that day. And I've yet to still see the
season finale of M.A.S.H., twenty-four years later.
—Editor]

Disney Horror Story #2

No date for this one, but it happened sometime during the very
late 80s, very early 90s.

During the week, I got a call from my Aunt Kay (Dad's sister) and
Uncle Dale that they were going to be at Walt Disney World and would
I like to come by and meet them there.

For some obscure reason, I said “yes” (I suspect it was because
I had yet to do a road trip on my own, and felt this was as good a
time as any—so I guess this would place it sometime in '89 or so).
On the appointed day (a Saturday as I want to recall) I got up
early, and drove the two and a half hours along the Florida
Turnpike to International
Drive in Orlando.

It then took another hour to drive the few miles along
International Drive to the parking lot of Walt Disney World.

It then took yet another hour to get from the parking
lot to the actual park itself.

And then I had the daunting task of finding my familiar
relations.

This was back when cell phones weren't quite as ubiquitous as
today.

I finally met up with them around 1:00 pm.

Spent the day riding rides and eating hideously expensive food
and around 10:00 pm we all headed to the monorail station to leave
the park.

Only the monorail system had broken down, thus trapping a few
thousand people within the Kingdom of the Rat God for several
hours past closing.

It was around midnight that I was eventually back in my car,
heading south as fast as my little car could go (I didn't worry
about speeding tickets as state troopers blew past me on the
Turnpike), with this massive migraine headache for the entire
trip.

Not a fun time.

Disney Silly Story

Again, no definite dates, but given the facts of the story, this
one happened in the very early 90s, back when I was living at home,
working a job that paid me ridiculous amounts of money, meaning I
had large amounts of discretionary funds to burn through.

My friend Sean Williams announced one Friday that instead of the
usual Saturday plans, he instead, had to drive up to the University of Central
Florida (in Orlando) to pick up a pair of shoes from his
brother. Not having much else planned for that Saturday, Bill
Lefler, Mark
Hamzy (which is a different Mark than the one I normally mention
here) and I invited ourselves along for the ride.

So Saturday morning we all piled into a car and headed north.

We arrived at Sean's brother's dorm room, picked up the pair of
shoes, and were back in the car in less than half an hour. Sean was
ready to drive all the way back; Bill, Mark and I were simply amazed
that that was it.

Most people wouldn't have bothered to enter any of the
Disney parks past 2:00 pm, but not us. We (actually, now that I
think about it, I think it was mostly Mark) wanted to see Epcot, and
gosh darn it, we were going to see Epcot.

We walked around a bit, discussing where we should eat (and
that's another story for another time, the whole “Where Should We
Eat” ritutal we went through every Friday and Saturday)
and ended up in the Mexican
Pavilion (where I had Chocolate Chicken—a very unusual but
rather tasty dish).

Afterwards, we stuck around for the fireworks show, then
left.

So, not only did we have enough money for a fairly expensive
Mexican dinner, but enough money to get into Epcot for a fairly
expensive Mexican dinner.

But like I said, I was living at home at the time, making obscene
amounts of money. So was Bill. And Mark. And Sean.

Obligatory Miscellaneous

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